Number of the Month

October 2002

Sinister, or what?

Even a few years reporting on the modern numbers rackets
left your bending author unprepared for the latest development. The British Wind
Energy Association has published
a list of names of people who have publicly opposed its aims under the heading We
know where you live. These people, who were rightly protesting at the
outrageous granting of planning permission for Enron to erect 39 giant
windmills on the beautiful Welsh coast, have received the classic veiled threat.
We are now only too familiar with the extortion that goes on (for example, the
British nuclear industry, which is in deep financial trouble, has to pay a
carbon tax, though it produces no carbon, which is diverted into the pockets of
the wind machine mobsters) but the fact that it is now so open is somewhat
disturbing. Even if global warming were something more than a pseudo-scientific
myth, the case for desecrating the landscape with these monstrous, noisy,
bird-slicing, white elephants would be a feeble one. You still have to provide
an equivalent amount of conventional back up power for when the wind isn’t
blowing. The economic case, without the proceeds of extortion, is a nonsense.
Furthermore, even if you swallowed the whole Kyoto scam, the effect on global
warming would be negligible.

We live in trouble times.

Tell me the old, old
story

When you are referee for a number of scientific journals, a
Herculean labour your bending author has gratefully passed onto others, certain
types of weak offerings come to you in various guises. One classical and
ubiquitous genre is the “second order system model” and a fine example of it
appears in Nature.
It has been applied to almost everything, in this case to the stock market. It
is always a Good Thing these days to pick on a topic that is currently hot in
the media. The verbiage tells you that the authors have created a model in which
they have built in a return force proportional to the displacement, a damping
factor and inertia. In more familiar terms they have defined a pendulum.
Surprise, surprise the result is a decaying oscillation.

When you have seen a few dozen similar waveforms it is
difficult to stifle a yawn. These models serve no scientific purpose, as they
make no predictions that can be tested. The big difference is that these days
they get published.

Thoughts from the
greenhouse

Regular correspondent Frank R Borger questions the answer
given to the FAQ on the greenhouse effect,
observing correctly that it does not include the contribution of the suppression
of convection to the operation of a real greenhouse. He cites an article
on the valuable Bad Science web site. This your bending author has read and,
being but a simple engineer, has failed to understand. Enlightenment would be
welcome via the Number Watch Forum. Meanwhile,
here are a few thoughts that occur on the matter:

My
greenhouse only warms up when the sun is shining (during the day) and
cools down when it is dark (at night).

The
second law of thermodynamics tells us that heat will not spontaneously pass
from a body to a warmer body. This includes radiation.

The
atmosphere and the surface of the earth are at roughly the same absolute
temperature.

The
sun is somewhat hotter than either.

Even
if it is diffused, daylight comes from the sun only. That is why it is dark
at night.

Convection
does not cause any loss of heat to the Earth as a whole; it merely
redistributes it. The only mechanism by which the Earth loses heat is
radiation.

While
the suppression of convection keeps a greenhouse warm, it does not cause it
to warm in the first place. It warms up because its contents receive
radiation (directly or indirectly) from a much warmer body.

While
the atmosphere is a source of radiation it is not a source of energy. It is
an energy store (like the solid earth and, particularly, the oceans). These
are all approximately in thermal equilibrium, the small deviations from
which produce the weather.

Of
course it is nonsense to say that the atmosphere keeps the earth warm by
acting as a blanket, if anyone is saying that. We are enjoined, instead, to
use the explanation “The surface of the Earth is warmer than it would be
in the absence of an atmosphere because it receives energy from two sources:
the Sun and the atmosphere.” This is like saying the customers receive
more goods because they can get them from two sources; the manufacturer and
the retailer. The surface of the Earth would receive almost exactly the same
amount of total radiation if there were no atmosphere.

The
Earth reradiates exactly the same amount of energy as it receives (ignoring
possible nuclear sources in the interior). The atmosphere raises the
equilibrium temperature needed to achieve that amount of radiation. It does
this by creating gaps in the spectrum.

The
atmosphere is part of the Earth. Apart from a small contribution to the
effective cross-section, it does not change the total radiation received by
the Earth. It has two significant properties in respect of temperature
maintenance. One is its thermal capacity, which causes it to act as a
low-pass filter and smooth out temperature fluctuations in time and space.
The other is its absorption spectrum. In particular, it preferentially
absorbs infrared radiation, both in the inward and outward direction, a
property it shares with glass. While the greenhouse analogy is in many ways
inexact (as are all analogues) it is not all that bad.

The
argument is largely a semantic one. The only thing that really matters is
the absorption spectrum and that is largely down to water vapour.
This is the crucial point.

Note added a day later

Perhaps, on further thought, the above remarks are
over-complicated and possibly a little facetious. The argument in the article
quoted contains one of the fundamental fallacies; what might be called the
fallacy of reciprocation or "one half of the balance sheet". Omitted
is the fact that the Earth is also warm and transfers heat back to the
atmosphere. As they are (on average) in thermal equilibrium the heat flow in
both directions sums to zero.

The so-called greenhouse effect is simply explained as a
three body problem. The three bodies are one that is very small but very hot,
the Sun, one that is very large and very cold, outer space, and the earth. The
first two may be considered to act as black bodies, so they emit according to
Wien's laws. The energy transfer is governed by the area under the black body
spectrum, which depends only on the temperature. The blue planet, however, is
not a black body. Its absorption/emission spectrum contains gaps, due mainly to
the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere. As it is in thermal equilibrium
with the other two bodies, it has to radiate as much as it absorbs. In order for
the area under the spectrum to be sufficient, the equilibrium temperature must
therefore be higher than if it were a black body.

Cowboys and Indians

Do they not read? Do they not understand? Or are they
just wilful liars?

New Labour BBC has come up with one of those old hardy
perennials about the dangers of weak radiation. It has been known ever since the
Manhattan Project in 1943 that ionising radiation shares with many other toxic
agents the property of hormesis. This is the tendency for small doses
actually to be beneficial, or at least neutral, in their effect. Furthermore it
is known that human DNA incurs a dramatically large number of lesions per cell
per year, which are repaired. For a full discussion with references see
Jaworowski in What Risk? (Edited by Roger Bate, Butterworth Heineman, 1997,
ISBN 0 7506 3810 9).

People who are
exposed to even low levels of radiation at work may be at risk of cancer,
scientists have suggested.
They believe that current safety limits may be too high and that more
research needs to be done to protect health workers, scientists and others
who come into contact with radioactive materials.

They investigated people in a part of India where the
background radiation is higher than anywhere else and it goes on:

The vast majority
of people living in this area are fishermen and come into regular contact with
the sands.

The scientists
examined the effects of the radiation on mitochondrial DNA - the tiny energy
factories which power cells.

They found that
those exposed to radiation had higher levels of "point mutations" in
their mitochondrial DNA.
A "point mutation'' takes place when a single "base'' - the genetic
code is made up of four bases - along a DNA strand gets changed.
People who lived locally but were not exposed to the radioactive sands had
significantly fewer mutations.
The mutations affect non-coding DNA and do not have an impact on health.
However, the scientists have suggested that encoding genes - those that can
trigger disease - could also be affected.
They added that the findings raise serious questions about the levels of
radiation people can be exposed to at work.
The people in the study were exposed to radiation which is 10 times greater than
the worldwide average.

What they don’t tell us, of course, is whether these
people exhibited a higher level of disease than anyone else. Is it unreasonable
to expect that this would be the obvious thing to investigate before launching
such a scare? Or is it that they already know what the result would be?

It has become a whole new genre, like the alcohol
on planes farce. A study that has nothing to do with anything relevant and,
indeed, goes out of its way to avoid the obvious relevant observation, is used
to call for draconian laws limiting human activity. It concludes (emphasis and
questions added):

Dr Peter Forster of
the Molecular Genetics Laboratory at the McDonald Institute at the University of
Cambridge, said these safety limits should be reviewed. Why?
"These findings may be cause for rethinking whether the maximum
levels for radiation exposure at work should be brought down."
Speaking to BBC News Online, he added: "This section of DNA will always be
non-coding but we only looked at this bit. Why?
"Perhaps it is happening to other genes and maybe it is
happening to genes that have been linked to cancer."

Footnote

The indefatigable Aaron
Oakley has unearthed studies that actually did compare those exposed with
the general population. Guess what!

Hell and high water

L'Enfer, c'est les Autres
Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos

15th October, 11 pm. The New Labour BBC
programme called Wild Weather finished an hour ago. Still seething but
calm enough to write some thoughts. Had a strange flashback to childhood, when
numbers of boys from poor areas all over England could have an almost free
holiday at the then unspoiled (though no longer) Brean Sands in Somerset.
Idyllic days on the beach and the wildlife reserve on the headland. The pay off
came at seven every evening when we had to endure an hour of hellfire and
damnation from the Plymouth Brethren who ran the camp (unless, of course, you
bought the product, when you would be assured of eternal life). The programme
was about fifty minutes of superb production based on hot spots around the
world, the usual amount of fakery for the sake of dramatisation, but immensely
effective for all that. The pay off came in the last ten minutes. The commentary
was infested with MMC disease, but the images
were hellfire and damnation based on the global
warming myth and, of course, the greenhouse
effect without the water vapour. Manhattan was submerged and broken up into
two islands. Floodwater surged through the New York subway. It was pure naked
propaganda for the Green energy-free society. The message was that we were all
to bake or drown in hell unless we voluntarily returned to the idyll of the
Stone Age. We were urged to visit the Climate
Change website. There is even a small patronising section for the sceptics,
including ESEF and Philip
Stott. Those who have read 1984 will remember to chant “Hate, hate,
hate!” when they come to that bit.

There is, however, light in the darkness. When you read the
contributions to the message
board associated with this propaganda package, the admass do not seem to be
as uniformly gullible as Establishment might feel entitled to expect. That's the
trouble with pestilential humanity; they don't all swallow Nanny's prescription.

Sez it all, reelly

Bullet point from a large display advertisement in the Independent
on behalf of the Faculty of which your bending author was once proud to be a
member:

Our principle (sic) degree's (sic)
are all rated five star.

Fortune cookies

Three is the number of irresistible financial offers your
bending author has received from the continent of Africa in one day. They have
been coming for about five years now, but this is a record. It is very touching
to be so implicitly trusted by complete strangers with vast fortunes that they
have found in their possession and, in order to share in the bonanza, all one
has to do is hand over all the details of one’s personal bank account . Mr.
John Cisse was personalconfidant to the President of Sierra Leone and
now has possession of his treasure of eighteen million dollars in the Cote d'
Ivoire. Mrs Happiness Bangurah is the widow of the President of the Sierra Leone
Diamond Corporation and has the problem of disposing of a mere twelve million.
Sello Sankoh, on the other hand, has twenty two million, which his father left
in an iron box. While it is flattering to be uniquely selected to assist such
trusting people, one who completely failed even to get in on the dot com
revolution is not really qualified to assist is such cases, however profitable.
Nevertheless, there must be some punters out there who are eager to help or the
messages would have dried up long ago.

Perhaps they should apply to the Phineas T Barnum School of
Investment Counseling.

Broken dreams

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
That’s the trouble with government. Fixing things that aren’t broken and
not fixing things that are broken.

Bert Lance

It is difficult to overstate the scale of the
problems caused by meddling politicians with numbers before their eyes. In
recent months the British media have been obsessed with the disaster that has
overtaken the two most vulnerable elements in society, the old and the young.

The schools examination system sailed on smoothly for
decades. It was overseen by university examination boards and was admired and
adopted around the world. This was not good enough for the bureaucrats and,
taking advantage of the Thatcherite revolution, they began to take control. The
school leaving exams (A-level) in particular had maintained a constant high
standard for many years. Then in 1982 (that dread year again) the A-level scores
began to rise and continued to do so for two decades. Panic ensued this year
when they began to approach the buffers, at which everybody got the top grade
and there was a crude attempt to doctor the results after the event. Many
students were cheated of their university places by being arbitrarily
downgraded. The Education Minister, who gives every appearance of not being
particularly bright, found herself at the centre of a mounting crisis with the
media calling for her head.

The other aspect of existence that proceeded fairly
smoothly was the pensions industry. Again successive governments simply could
not leave well alone. David Willets, one of the few members of the opposition to
show occasional signs of cognitional life, has unearthed the latest and greatest
of a series of blunders that will destroy the hopes of people who looked forward
to a reasonably comfortable retirement. The Office for National Statistics has
been grossly overestimating the amount being saved, by no less than 43.5%.
They did this by the process of double counting that has been endemic in
Government obfuscation over recent years. It brings the Chancer of the
Exchequer’s grotesque raid on pension funds into even starker perspective. As Patience
Wheatcroft pointed out in The Times (Oct 22nd) an attempt
to cover this up involved an essay in the sort of opaque prose that has also
become a characteristic tool of Government. Meanwhile, in yet another
characteristic ploy, the Government has been leaking various draconian proposals
from its working party on a pensions White Paper, such as withdrawal of the
right to a tax free lump sum and tax relief at higher rates. The purpose of this
is to get through slightly less nasty changes, at which everyone is supposed to
heave a sigh of relief. Now people are being told that they will have to work
until they are seventy, even though in the age of ageism there are no jobs for
the over fifty fives. Not only will they spend their dotage in slavery, but they
will be dependent on the bureaucratic wreckage that was the National Health
Service.

However bad the Conservative Governments were (and they
were bad) they come nowhere near New Labour in their ability to destroy the
lives and hopes of ordinary people.

Which all calls to mind a famous quotation from Labour
Leader Neil Kinnock:

If Margaret Thatcher wins on Thursday, I warn
you not to be ordinary, I warn you not to be young, I warn you not to fall
ill, and I warn you not to grow old. (Speech 1983).

Numeromania

The latest crisis in British politics is the threatened
strike by Firemen. Caught between union militancy and Government obduracy, the
firemen are in a bind which could have tragic consequences for the nation at
large. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the argument, regulars at Number
Watch will experience a moment of recognition on reading a contribution to
The Times debate
(emphasis added):

Uncaring
Government

I
AM a serving officer of more than 25 years in the fire service. We are
approaching a period of action that I hoped and prayed we would never see in
this country again. I have never had a strong orientation towards the union and
initially I was very much against the course of action that will soon be upon
us. But through the lies, spin and misinformation that this Government
consistently seems to produce my views have changed radically.

It
is my view that this Government does not really care about people; it is more
interested in achieving targets and setting quotas. I agree that the figure
of 40 per cent is unrealistic but it is a basis on which to talk. Why did the
Government intervene in June when the employers offered 16 per cent? Why does
the Government want us to wait for the outcome of the review, when the previous
eight reviews have all said the same thing: firefighters deserve more pay, the
service is underfunded. The response to these surveys was more targets, more
quotas and yet more new initiatives.

By
Mr Brown’s statement that pay within the public sector will not be allowed to
increase above set levels is an indication that whatever the outcome of this
latest review, it will be dealt with in the same way as its predecessors.

We
have a health service in which managers are given little training and are again
set unrealistic targets. We have nurses who are leaving for the private health
sector, job opportunities abroad, or alternative careers because of low pay,
long hours and the constant threat of abuse both verbal and physical. But how
does the Government address this? By bringing in staff from other countries who
are not trained to the same high standards, and who in many cases are unable to
communicate effectively.

We
have teachers who are overworked and suffer abuse for very little reward, but
once again the cheap option is taken — let’s create a new role: the
“senior classroom assistant”.

Under
new Labour, Britain is a country that has to meet its targets and attain its
quotas as cheaply as possible with minimal care for the people who provide these
services.

Phil
Lawrence, Station Commander, Whitechapel, East London

New Labour rules,
OK!

A piece from the Daily Mail (Oct 22nd)

Red-tape burden grows by 13 rules
a day

LABOUR is increasing bureaucracy
on businesses, hospitals and schools at a rate of 13 new pieces of red tape a
day.
Family doctors are now expected to juggle 370 separate targets.
And industry leaders estimate that red tape is costing £6 bil1ion a year.
The bleak picture was revealed at a Conservative Party summit.
Last year alone, Ministers introduced 4,642 new pieces of regulation – about
13 for every day of the year.
GP Greg Wilcox told MPs his practice was swamped by targets covering everything
from staff numbers to the types of drugs prescribed. He said he had no idea what
many of the targets were and questioned their value.
Sheila Scott, of the National Care Homes Association, said the sector had to
handle 250 pieces of regulation. Many owners spent all their time fi1ling out
forms rather than dealing with residents, she said.
But the Cabinet Office's regulation impact unit dismissed the criticism. It
claimed 97 per cent of the 4,642 new regulations did not affect business.
Instead, they covered pension rules, benefit changes and road traffic schemes. A
spokesman added that 670 regulations were linked to last year's foot-and-mouth
outbreak.

Interesting idea of a rebuttal, considering that pensions,
benefits and traffic are now all widely regarded as major disaster areas. As for
foot and mouth, this has been the greatest fiasco in the long history of
maladministration, resulting in the deaths of over 7 million innocent and
healthy farm animals, as has been endlessly pointed out in these pages.
Furthermore, by the rule of the ratchet, many of these regulations are still in
place, adding further harassment to the life of farmers.

The extraordinary situation in British agriculture is now
that the most profitable crop is – wait for it – absolutely nothing at all.
Thanks to the EU subsidies and the Treasury pocketing the British refund, it now
pays a farmer to set aside the whole of his land.

Though this be method, yet there is madness in it.

Vale

The Minister of Education resigned two days after the
posting of the above piece Broken dreams. There was
honour in her going. She was honest about being unable to cope with a job. Not
surprising as this was, in fact, rendered impossible by the combination of political
dogma and Treasury meddling. Your bending author humbly dedicates his latest,
wholly original, ode to her memory.

Return of Finger Man

They are like those super villains in the super hero comic
magazines. Knock them down and up they bounce. Salmon
Women, Pylon Man and, of
course, the indefatigable Finger Man.
Modesty forbids naming their heroic adversary Number Man who normally
masquerades as a mild-mannered retired engineering professor, but dives into a
telephone booth to pull his underpants over his trousers when nonsense
threatens.

This from the Sunday Times of October 27:

THE
deepest secrets of your personality are revealed not in the stars but in your
fingers. Whether you are a risk-taker or a worrier, have the gift of the gab
or the potential to become a champion skier, the clues are in the lengths of
your digits, according to new research.

Among women, risk-taking and assertiveness are linked to a
relatively long ring finger. A reduced tendency to neurosis and poor verbal
skills are also likely to be found among women with this shape of hand.

The new links between finger size and personality have been
discovered by scientists at Liverpool University. They examined the
personality traits of 200 people and then checked the length of their fingers.

The completion of a series of studies on finger length, culminating in a
forthcoming book, has allowed Dr John Manning, an evolutionary biologist who
leads the Liverpool University team, to correlate a list of traits among men
and women with different finger lengths.

As you were kind enough to announce the foundation of the Phlogiston
Research Unit at the University of Nether Wallop, I trust you will join me
in condemning the outrageous attack by Robert Matthews in the Sunday
Telegraph of October 27. Even that J B Priestly realised that he was dealing
with de-phlogistated air. Yet a so-called British newspaper lauds the spurious
theories of that foreign imposter Lavoisier, who failed to appreciate that
phlogiston has negative mass. They even
quote a new book by Dr Walter Gratzer (obviously another foreigner) called Eurekas
and Euphorias. I bet the Climate Research Unit does not have to put up with
the sort of harassment.

Yours faithfully

Dean
Faculty of Advance Chemistry and Roadside Catering
University of Nether Wallop

Number of the month 800,000,000,000

Over a year ago Number Watch suggested that one of the
numbers to look our for was personal debt and
added a reminder in February this year.
It is a number that has been blithely ignored by politicians and the media. Now
it is announced that in the UK personal debt for the first time has reached a
startling £800
billion. Of course, this is dwarfed by the American numbers, but we are a
small country. Both here and in the USA the pushers are more and more
aggressive, concentrating on people with poor credit ratings. The USA has
converted itself from a nation of savers to one of debtors in just a
few years. Much of the debt is to credit card companies who are able to
charge usurious rates of interest. Then, of course, there is national debt. The
British Chancer of the Exchequer has come up with a new scam to hide his
borrowing, a form of hire purchase known as the Private Finance Initiative, but
the effect, as with the borrowing of the post-war Labour Government, will be to
lumber future generations and governments with onerous repayments. To mix a
couple of metaphors, the time bomb is ticking and we stand on the edge of a very
steep precipice. Perhaps at some time in the future someone will write the
horror story When the borrowing had to stop.

Footnote
(from Our Man In Puerto Rico)

At the current exchange rate (1.56 USD/Pound), that's $1248 billion. With a
population of 60 million you have $20,800 per capita debt.

On the other hand, the US debt is $6,780 billion. On a population of 282
million, US per capita debt is $24,214. You're still ahead.

On yet another hand, US per capita income is $30,000 or so, whereas UK's is
about $23,000. You are in second place...